Petroleum is a vital source of fuels for transportation, industrial chemicals that produce polymers, plastics, pharmaceuticals, paints and other important chemicals. However, due to economic, environmental and political factors, new sources besides petroleum are being sought for the production of these materials.
Technologies to manufacture industrial commodities such as methanol are mature and used to produce the world's supply from synthesis gas that comes from methane, coal, etc. Ethanol is produced by fermentation and hydration of ethylene produced from petroleum. Technology to produce ethanol from cellulose is still in development. Efforts have been made to develop a synthesis of ethanol from synthesis gas but no satisfactory technologies have materialized yet. There has been increased use of ethanol as a fuel additive and also as an automotive fuel itself. Ethanol does not have a high heat of combustion (30 MJ/kg ethanol vs 45 MJ/kg gasoline) thus yielding significantly lower mileage than gasoline. Another issue with ethanol is the difficulty of ethanol transport by pipeline due to its corrosivity.
Various efforts are underway to find economic fermentation processes to produce butanol which is also an important fuel alternative and industrial chemical. However the economy of these processes due to the time required for each fermentation cycle, environmental problems from large amounts of water consumption for these processes and difficulty of isolation of butanol from broths along with its toxicity to microbes are challenges that have not been overcome.
The present invention avoids these issues and is a novel method to synthesize fuels and chemicals from non-petroleum sources such as biomass, coal and natural gas. The synthetic manufacture of fuels and chemicals, for example alcohols and alkanes with four or more carbons, offers the potential for higher energy fuels that are readily compatible with existing automotive and transportation infrastructure.